Does anybody know what the deal is with the absence of the LOTR Battle for Middle Earth RTS games from any digital distribution?
Are they in license hell with the Tolkien estate or something? Truly some of the finest RTS games that ever got made, and they hold up pretty well, actually. However, I’m a bit dismayed they don’t sell them anywhere digitally. Very curious what the deal is. Since EA published the games, you’d think they’d be a natural to put on Origin for $20 or so.
What gives?
EA shut the multiplayer servers down for all BfME titles a while ago. Whether that was actually required by their terms of license or just them cutting their losses as usual is dubious, but I suppose they don’t want to sell them in a crippled form.
Much sadness, I have both games sitting in a box somewhere. :(
I own retail copies of both as well. They are fantastic games with great single-player campaigns. In fact, I don’t think I ever spent much time at all with the multi-player aspect of either game, I just powered through the campaigns and was very satisfied.
I would think that both games are strong enough in single-player and hold up well enough in terms of graphics, design and content, that EA could release them digitally, maybe with the multi-player stripped out somehow, set the price point at $15 or so and make a decent amount of money, especially with the Hobbit movies having brought LotR back into the general consciousness.
My son asked me this questions last weekend. We installed the first on from disks. There is plenty there for single player.
Seems reasonable.
I see that kind of thing all the time on Amazon and have never understood what the deal was. I mean, nobody is seriously going to buy it at that price, so what’s the point? Does the seller just put it out there for years hoping he’ll get lucky one day? Or maybe some crime syndicate somewhere is using vintage video games to launder money somehow? Master of Magic for $300. that’s some dirty money right there! ;-)
It’s demand, sadly. People are willing to pay for physical copies of games they can no longer get otherwise. I think I paid ~$70 in total for my copy of Battle for Middle Earth 2 and its expansion because I kept hearing how great they were. I’m playing through them now, and they ARE worth that much money for how awesome they are, to me at least.
The “long tail” doesn’t work if you don’t make the product available. They’re leaving free money laying on the table. I’m convinced there must be some licensing problem in play here.
Well, you can as a last resort to go [YARRRRR!] and obtain it. Seems tragic that’s the only alternative people have left though. There should be some sort of 5-year out of print clause where the game turns public domain if it hasn’t been available in any form from the copyright holder.
Oh yeah, haha, chortle. Copyright law in the US is so screwed up, nothing like that could ever happen. Copyright is now 95 years. A few years ago, some people argued to the Supreme Court that if Congress keeps extending copyright by 5 years every 5 years, then copyright is perpetual, which violates the Constitution, which says that copyrights are to be for “limited times”. They lost.
This thread makes me sad. But this icon on my desktop makes me happy:
Actually, both icons. Two fantastic games orphaned by EA, but each with a permanent home on my hard drive.
-Tomthey are dangerously close to the first icon… be careful!
Omg who keeps stuff in their recycle bin!!! :O
I still have the pirate versions of the BfME1+2 games installed (I bought boxed copies) and it’s the only reason I my paid version of Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% installed. I’ll be sad when such a useful site for game preservation as GameCopyWorld and its mirrors finally disappears under the weight of pirates not caring about physical copy DRM/copy protection emulation anymore.
Good point there, I should probably grab the clean executables for all my old DVD media games I have before that site disappear. Not to mention it was much easier to make game-trainers for games without evil copyrestriction on them (as the DRM usually tried to guard the memory of the executables…).
This thread reminded me I’ve got this installed but have only played through one mission in the good campaign, so I played through a couple more tonight. Holy shit this game is great.
Who uses desktop icons!? I keep everything on my task bar so I can enjoy the full splendor of my wallpaper! :)
Stardock Fences and its double-click-to-hide is great.
I have retail physical copies of the game - I went to reinstall it a few weeks ago and the first disc failed to install -tried again and again and again.
Some quick searches found that this was a common issue on these discs :(
Of course, my searches for a legit method in getting a new version of the game is all for not due to the pricing. Hell, people are selling copies of this game sans disc 1 on ebay. Nuts. If anyone could help a gamer out - PM me, otherwise I’m tempted to toss my physical discs in the trash :(